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World: The Cambodian Venture: An Assessment

8 minute read
TIME

BY the middle of this week, the last several thousand U.S. troops in Cambodia are scheduled to cross back over the invisible line that divides Cambodia and South Viet Nam, thus bringing the war’s most controversial military action to an official end. The national debate that President Nixon’s Cambodian decision touched off is certain to continue, however—in the press, in Congress and in the history books. Nixon rendered his own verdict three weeks ago, calling the Cambodian operation the “most successful” military action of the war, a judgment likely to be echoed in his written report to the nation this week. Others, perhaps just as hastily, have compared America’s “success” in Cambodia to the results of the Tet offensive of 1968, which Lyndon Johnson considered an American victory. In a narrow military sense, Tet was, but it also was the decisive point of disenchantment with the war for a substantial number of Americans.

Ironically, it is still doubtful whether the Administration ever intended the Cambodian border raids to assume proportions of such overriding importance to the conduct of the war. To be sure, in announcing them the President equated an American failure to act with being “humiliated” and “defeated” in Southeast Asia. He insisted that the incursions were essential to his basic goals: Vietnamization and American withdrawal. Yet as President, he had never suggested that the Communist sanctuaries, in existence for five years, threatened to doom either plan. Nixon’s explanation was that the Communists were now “linking” the sanctuaries and threatening to turn eastern Cambodia into a “vast enemy staging area.” It had been that for five years.

At the time of the allied assault, the Communists were involved in a conflict with the six-week-old Phnom-Penh government of Premier Lon Nol, which had overthrown Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18 and had ordered all North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops to give up their Cambodian sanctuaries and leave the country. Moving westward so as to put pressure on Lon Nol not to interfere with their refuges and their supply lines, the Communists started seizing territory on the way to the Mekong River. In effect, they turned their backs on South Viet Nam; as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird has acknowledged privately, the Communists’ thinned-out ranks suddenly lowered the risk of American casualties in border raids. His clear implication was that the U.S. was not moving against any major new enemy threat, but had simply seized a golden—and perhaps temporary—opportunity to wipe out a persistent problem: the enemy positions and stockpiles in Cambodia that constantly menaced the city of Saigon, which is only 35 miles from the border.

On that limited score, the Cambodian venture was indeed a success. In eight weeks of concentrated scrounging, U.S. troops hauled off or destroyed mountains of painstakingly hidden Communist supplies. Estimates of the haul range up to 50% of the Communists’ entire stockpile in eastern Cambodia. –

It quickly became clear, however, that the major results of the Cambodian forays could not be weighed and measured so precisely. Their impact has yet to be fully assessed, but they raise some fateful questions:

Did Nixon’s decision lower national confidence in his leadership? Until Cambodia, the President had all but defused the war-protest movement. The invasion, in conjunction with the deaths at Kent State, resuscitated antiwar sentiment as nothing else could have done. While the polls show no loss of support for Nixon from the nation at large, Americans are probably less certain now than two months ago that the U.S. can steadily disengage from Indochina without enduring further crises. In the Senate, which has virtually forsaken its other business to debate Cambodia, the President’s support has dropped noticeably. Adept maneuvering by Nixon’s supporters will probably prevent the passage of any meaningful limits on his powers to conduct the war, but the Senate has informally served notice that it will not abide any further escalation.

Did the invasion precipitate permanent warfare on Cambodian soil? North Vietnamese and Viet Cong plans in Cambodia, beyond their aim of regaining use of the sanctuaries, are still far from clear. The U.S. raids obviously weakened the 40,000 Communist troops in Cambodia, but not enough to keep them from placing the Lon Nol government “in a very difficult position,” as the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Phnom-Penh, Lloyd M. Rives, puts it mildly. The Communist rampages through Cambodia’s towns that began before the U.S. moved against the sanctuaries constituted open aggression against a neutral state. Unfortunately for Cambodia, the U.S. invasion tended to obscure that fact in the eyes of other neutrals. Even without the U.S. and South Vietnamese assault, it is hard to say whether Cambodia would have got much help from outside nations. “The war in Viet Nam has gone on too long,” says Sim Var, a member of the Cambodian National Assembly. “People have been rendered insensible to suffering. Even war for a just cause fails to arouse them.” Whether the Communists wanted to overthrow the Lon Nol government before the invasion is debatable—just as it is uncertain whether they hope to do so now. Primarily they want to keep open their supply lines to South Viet Nam.

To what extent is the U.S. now committed to help yet another Southeast Asian country as a result of the Cambodia raids? President Nixon has flatly ruled out the further use of U.S. ground troops in Cambodia, but Washington is rushing $7,900,000 worth of military supplies to Phnom-Penh, is bargaining with Thailand to supply men at U.S. expense, and would like to encourage an all-Asia defense effort. One knowledgeable observer says that Washington plans to use “everything up to the introduction of ground combat troops.” Last week, after U.S. bombers were reported flying in support of Cambodian army missions, Secretary of State William Rogers admitted that some of the continuing U.S. interdiction raids in Cambodia might be of “direct benefit” to the Cambodian army, even though their real purpose was to “protect Americans in South Viet Nam.”

Will the raids hasten or slow up Vietnamization? The clearing of the sanctuaries should provide, for six months at least, a valuable measure of relief for the southern half of South Viet Nam, especially in the Mekong Delta, where 60% of the rural population lives. On the other hand, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam has shown itself only too eager to conduct the war outside its own country; its operations in Cambodia have greatly raised its morale. But if Saigon commits large numbers of men to fighting in Cambodia, the job of bringing security to South Viet Nam will inevitably be slowed. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, no doubt reacting in part to U.S. warnings about such a hazard, last week promised: “I do not lead this country toward a bogging down in the war, nor do I lead the army into uncalculated adventurous moves.” –

In sum, then, it appears that President Nixon acted in Cambodia on the advice of his generals that here was a relatively cheap and opportune way to hurt the enemy and thus secure if not hasten U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam. An ancillary benefit might be the propping up of the Lon Nol government. The short-run military objectives have been achieved, at considerably less cost in U.S. lives than military planners anticipated. In the long run, the fate of the Lon Nol government hangs largely on the whim of Hanoi—which is why, in all his justifications of the border crossing, the President has wisely never made any public pledge to defend Cambodia’s present government.

As so often earlier in the long war, the Cambodian decision has set in motion a secondary chain reaction in the U.S. For Richard Nixon, that reaction must seem a negative and not fully foreseen outcome. It has cost him credibility with the people, aroused and angered the Congress and surely limited his future choices in Indochina. Still, by demonstrating to the President the fragility of American public opinion about the war and the deep weariness of the U.S. with any course that does not lead the troops home, the invasion of Cambodia may well, by limiting Nixon’s options, ultimately shorten the war. That, of course, was the President’s aim in deciding to go into Cambodia in the first place. It is just that it may be working out in ways that he did not expect and would not have chosen.

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